From bad to worst

It was yet another worst day in the prime minister's career. How many more can there be? The news about the arrest of Lord Levy, tennis partner and chief fundraiser, emerged within a minute of his government being humiliated over the NatWest bankers. What the Labour whips did was ignore a division on the issue (won by the Lib Dems and Tories by 246 to, er, four) in the hopes of devaluing the vote itself. It is the parliamentary equivalent of taking the ball home because you're losing the match.

It whisked this aged veteran back to the late 1970s, when another struggling Labour government used the same method. They called this "the rug technique" because it pulled the rug from under the Opposition. It sort of worked - the votes were technicalities, on the "adjournment", and losing by 242 votes is, in some weird parliamentary way, less shameful than losing by one. But they left behind a picture of vacillating incompetence, of an administration with its eyes no longer gazing to the future but fixed firmly on the floor. It's government by nit-picking.

But the awfulness for Tony Blair began hours earlier. He arrived for question time looking drawn and anxious. He left looking worse. Labour MPs tried to help him by mocking David Cameron's speech about hoodies. Mr Blair wearily went through the motions, attacking the Tory voting record. Mr Cameron sprang up: "If you want to turn this into a session in which I answer the questions and he asks them, you can always call a general election." He chewed Mr Blair out on the (long postponed) police force mergers and the ID cards scheme. The civil servant who has to put it into action has said that it can't happen before 2026 - "and even you will be gone by then!"

"No! No!" shouted MPs sarcastically, and it sounded to me as if some were from the Labour side. "We will carry on with our policies," Mr Blair said, in the manner of Sisyphus explaining that the rock was almost at the top of the hill and this time would stay there. "We have a deputy prime minister who thinks he is a cowboy," said Mr Cameron, clearly encouraged by the bellows of support from behind him and the eerie silence in front of him. "He tells us that he is 'really looking forward' to to standing in for you over the summer. Please tell us that is not going to happen!"

The shouting grew so loud that the reply could hardly be heard. He looked groggy. You almost prayed for a trainer to rush into the ring and flap a towel in his face, and bang on time, the Speaker intervened to protect him.

He had one good moment, when Sir Gerald Kaufman gently slid a stiletto into David Cameron - something Mr Blair had conspicuously failed to do. He asked whether, when he had been mugged and robbed in London, the hoodie-wearing youths were "merely making a plea for love and understanding".

Then the debate on the bankers. Any issue that unites Michael Howard and George Galloway (both made vivid, over-the-top speeches) must have something wrong with it.

But the government had almost no support at all. "We are not a wholly owned subsidiary for the Americans!" said the Lib Dems' David Heath. Joan Ryan, an almost unbelievably junior Home Office minister, looked even more taut and unhappy than the prime minister had. Unlike him, she was literally saved by the bell as, after four minutes of her speech, the vote was called and the rug was pulled.